The economics of telecommunications have changed. In the recent past, every effort was made, through clever mathematical traffic modeling and network optimization, to economize the use of transport links. This naturally led to a network that was heavily dependent on multiple switching en route from source to destination. This practice applied almost equally to both the classical high-quality synchronous switching, as in the telephone network, and to the casual, care-free, but much more flexible, packet network. A disadvantage of transport-optimized approach is that it leads to a switch-cluttered network. A switch-cluttered network employing synchronous switching is still manageable; the global telephone network continues to provide virtually flawless service. A multi-hop network, such as the Internet, that uses care-free packet switching does suffer from the adverse effect of cumulative degradation as a path from source to destination traverses numerous router-switches. The mean number of hops decreases sharply as the dimension of the deployed router switches is increased. The decrement in the number of hops, coupled with the changing economics of signal transport can lead to a much simplified, powerful, and highly efficient telecommunication network.
There is a need, therefore, for a flexible router-switch, which scales gracefully from a capacity of multiple gigabits per second (for example 160×109 bits/second) to a capacity of the order of a petabit per second (1015 bits/second). Deployment of such a router-switch enables the construction of a global broadband network of virtually unlimited capacity while significantly reducing the number of hops between any two access points on the planet to an acceptable upper bound. The sought router-switch preferably accommodates individual connections of widely varying granularities, ranging from a few kilobits per second to multiple gigabits per second per user in order to form the basis of an economical monolithic broadband network of global coverage.